As far as newsgathering tools go, Storify has radically changed how reporters navigate breaking news and information on social media. In just a matter of clicks, a writer can pull together dozens of tweets, videos and photos onto one platform and collate it into one thorough, complete story. Although it provides for media, there isn’t an easy transition from one video to another.

Now, reporters can create high-impact story compilations with Soo Meta, a video mashup tool that enables users to piece together different Youtube clips to create a cohesive story based around a topic or idea. Users can pull in information from Youtube, Pinterest and Twitter and create full multimedia compilations. Each segment can be controlled and clipped, so only the most important parts of a video would make it into the final piece.

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The Internet Archive announced this week that it received a $1 million donation from the Knight Foundation to expand it’s TV News Search and Borrow archive of television news clips. As of now, the archive has just over 400,000 clips that the public can access, link to, or borrow a hard copy for a fee.

“We want to make all knowedge available to everyone, forever, and for free. So it’s an ambituous mission,” laughs Roger Macdonald, the archive’s television news project director. 

And it all comes down to closed captioning.

The San Francisco based non-profit records broadcasts, and teases out the news using closed captioning tags and other meta-data. Twenty-four hours after the first airing, the clip is available in the archive. It’s an invaluable resource for journalists, researchers, and documentarians to study what was said, when, where, and in what context. Want to play John Stewart? Go ahead and search clips of ‘Benghazi’ on Fox last week. It can also be used for more noble causes, like tracking political speech. Read more

For a journo who has found success with decidedly old-school methods, Ed Gordon has some advice for aspiring broadcasters: get on YouTube. “In today’s world… it’s about producing and owning your content,” he told Mediabistro in the latest installment of So What Do You Do?. Gordon also advises young people with dreams of being on the small screen to “learn where your craft is headed,” and talks about the importance of perseverance when it comes to career success.

“There are a lot of people who’ve given up trying to get on commercial television and have gone to securing their own YouTube channels, and I think, at the end of the day, that’s going to be the future of broadcasting,” Gordon said. “People are just going to put stuff out there. They’re gonna have their own YouTube channels, and eventually you’ll be able to buy things from those channels. But I think one of the things that people have to understand is it takes perseverance.”

Read the full interview in So What Do You Do, Ed Gordon, Host of Conversations with Ed Gordon?

Baratunde Thurston and the rest of the crew at Cultivated Wit are teaming up with AOL Studios to produce a show called FUNDED. It’ll feature crowdfunded projects from around the country and talk to the entrepreneurs about why they chose such a path. In a blog post announcing the project, Thurston implored anyone who knows of cool, under-the-radar projects to share.

What are your favorite crowdfunded journalism projects?

We all know video channels are the next step for news. It’s one thing if you’re The Atlantic or The Huffington Post. But smaller, regional publications are making the move, too. And it has been a slow, evolving process.

Phillyburbs.com, a Calkins Media Group website based in suburban Philadelphia, has been transitioning its print papers online for the past decade and it’s starting to get serious about video content. The Bucks County Courier Times, one of the group’s papers (and for the record, where my mother works), recently launched The Courier Times Update, a ten minute news broadcast that goes live on their website at 2pm every day. Rachel Canelli, the host of the update, has transitioned from a strictly print reporter to the Courier’s go-to video reporter over the past few years. She doesn’t have any broadcast experience, but like most mid-market journalists these days, she’s learned how produce her own video segments.

 Ever since we had a website, we’ve done video. But it was more random. Three years ago we started a weekly segment called Buzz In Bucks and that evolved from man on the street interviews and hard news to more feature content. Two years ago, we started doing daily news video. That’s when they started handing out iPhones and cameras – it was a big investment, and then everyone was expected to do video. And the photographers got in because the had the capability to shoot video. Within the last year or so, we hired the video consultant and bringing in new players – we hired a new CEO and general manager and we started to put an emphasis on moving to video, by investing in equipment and software to add advertisements into the videos.

How many of you are sitting in a newsroom struggling to stay relevant? It’s not easy. For the team at the Courier, it was about hiring Canelli to head the update, and repurposing other reporters and photographers in the newsroom to add more video content. It’s a bit of a scramble.  Read more